A woman comes in after having a baby and tells us she’s having trouble breastfeeding. I book her an appointment at a breastfeeding clinic, give her some resources, etc. Her appointment was fine and she went on her merry way. A few weeks later, we get the fax that she went to the breastfeeding clinic and everything was fine. Awesome.

A year later she shows up for her doctor’s appointment, and she’s morbidly obese. She must have put 100lbs on an already obese frame. She’s developed many health problems related to her weight (that she refuses to acknowledge are due to her weight. Of course.) She tells us she’s never been more active after having a kid, her diet hasn’t changed, her work life hasn’t changed, nothing has changed, the weight gain just happened due to ~hormones. We ask if she’s breastfeeding, she says yes. We ask how she’s getting the extra calories for the breastfeeding, and she tells us the Clinic told her to eat 1-2 bowls of plain oatmeal a day. It worked, so she’s still doing it.

We figure this is how she gained so much weight (she’s probably eating 2 large bowls of oatmeal on top of her meals, with milk, sugar, butter, etc), but the woman insists she’s eating 1-2 packets of plain oatmeal a day. Nothing on it, nothing added to it. It says plain on the package, it tastes plain, it’s plain.

We send the doctor in to see her after briefing him on the whole story about the oatmeal. He’s in the room with her a long time — much longer than normal. When she comes out of the room, she keeps her head down and walks off, looking angry and embarrassed. The doctor walks up to the nursing table and fills out the chart.

“You never asked what brand of oatmeal she’s eating”.

Yeah. Turns out she didn’t know plain rolled oats were a thing. She thought the breastfeeding clinic meant plain oatmeal cookies. She was eating an entire package of Dad’s oatmeal cookies every single day for a year (basically a ‘bowl or two’ filled with cookies), and could not understand how that was different from oatmeal.